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| Author(s): |
Daniel Martelozo Consalter
Total Authors: 1
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| Document type: | Master's Dissertation |
| Press: | Campinas, SP. |
| Institution: | Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Física Gleb Wataghin |
| Defense date: | 2009-06-19 |
| Examining board members: |
Anderson Campos Fauth;
Carlos Enrique Navia Ojeda;
José Augusto Chinellato
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| Advisor: | Anderson Campos Fauth |
| Abstract | |
The high energy cosmic rays actually are the center of attention of many physics around the world.These particle have energy above, equivalent a baseball with 300km/h, but the mechanism of acceleration, propagation even like the region that they are originated still unknown for the scientific community, fact that occurs due the difficult of detection from thes particles, because their flux is very low: a surface of 1 km 2 area is reached for one high energy particle per sr per year. This low flux obligates the build of giants experiments like Pierre Auger Observatory (PAO).Built in Malargue, Argentina,the PAO has 4 atmospheric fluorescence detectors and 1600 water Cherenkov tanks .The union of these two techniques made PAO a hybrid detector. This work can be divided in two principal parts, being the first a study of the water Cherenkov tank install d at Campinas that is identical of the tanks from South site of the Pi rre Auger Observatory. Firstly, we made a complete installation of the detector, in which was installed new electronic components, the data acquisition software was written and the internal humidity problem, that damages the electronic components, was solved. After the installation, we made a detector characterization using atmospheric muons selected by a muon telescope (2 scintillator detectors). We measured the dead time , working high voltage of each photomultiplier (PMT) and the medium charge produced by the vertical muon crossing the tank center (VEM), which value found was 100 pC. Measuring the signal dependence with the distance between the PMT and the position of the vertical muon, we could observe a decrease of the charge and increases of the time delay when this distance increase. But the sum of the charges in the 3 PMT kept constant. In addiction, we observed that, in the measure that the muons cross the photomultiplier there is a double peak in the time spectrum, being the first peak due the muon interaction with the photocathode and the second one by the Cherenkov light produced by the muon crossing the water. We completed the charact rization with the measurement of signal provided by inclined muon selected by the same telescope. These measurements show us the proportionality between the charge of the signal and the quantity of produced light by the particle. The second part of the work was the data analysis of the Pierre Auger surface detectors, in which firstly, we installed the software necessary to data analysis by ADST-OFFLINE. It was analyzed cosmic rays detected since 01 January 2004 until 31 December 2008 with energies above 3x1018 e V and zenith angle between 0o e 60o. From these data, we built differential cosmic rays spectra for each year and integrated yearly. This analysis shows that from 2007 the number of events is enough to confirm the flux suppression above 4x1019 e V due GZK effect. We also confirm that the high energy cosmic rays spectrum is well represented by the function F ¥ E,-g ,which g value measured for the spectrum with data acquired between 01 January 2004 and 31 December 2008 was 2,69 ± 0,04 in the energy range from 4x1018 e V until 4x1019 e V and 3,5 ± 0,5 for energy above 4x1019 e V. (AU) | |